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Mojave National Preserve Park Archaeologist David Nichols - Ep 26
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On Episode 26 we are interviewing David Nichols, Park Archaeologist, for the National Mojave Preserve. David has a remarkable background doing fieldwork over 15 years on the Pacific Rim and in Australia but returning to his first love the Mojave Desert. This Master's thesis relates to research in the region and his job keeps him very busy managing the 1.6 million acres that is chock full of rock art of many types - paintings, drawings and related features. Much to talk about.
Links
Contact
- Chris Webster
- chris@archaeologypodcastnetwork.com
- Twitter: @archeowebby
- Dr. Alan Garfinkel
- avram1952@yahoo.com
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Transcript
Introduction and Sponsor Announcement
00:00:00
Speaker
We're excited to announce that our very own podcasting platform, Zencaster, has become a new sponsor to the show. Check out the podcast discount link in our show notes and stay tuned for why we love using Zen for the podcast.
00:00:12
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network. Hello out there in archaeology podcast land. This is Dr. Alan Garfinkel.
Dr. Garfinkel and the California Rock Art Foundation
00:00:20
Speaker
I'm the president and founder of the California Rock Art Foundation. And what we do is we identify, evaluate, manage, and conserve rock art both in Alta California and in Baja California.
00:00:32
Speaker
We conduct field trips, we have trainings, exercise, we do research, and in every way possible we try to preserve, protect, and coordinate treasures of Alta and Baja, California Rock Guard, of which there are many, and diverse. We also work closely with Native Americans and partner with them to recognize and protect sacred sites.
Call for Support and Sponsorships
00:00:53
Speaker
So for more info about the fabulous California Rock Art Foundation, you can go to carockart.org. Also, I'm open to give me a call, 805-312-2261. We would welcome sponsorship or underwriting helping us to defray the costs of our podcasts and also membership in California Rock Art Foundation. And of course, donations since we are a 501c3 nonprofit scientific and educational corporation. God bless everyone out there in podcast land.
Introduction of David Nichols
00:01:27
Speaker
You're listening to The Rock Art Podcast. Join us every week for fascinating tales of rock art, adventure, and archaeology. Find our contact info in the show notes and send us your suggestions.
00:01:45
Speaker
Welcome to the Rock Art Podcast. This is Dr. Alan Garfinkel. This is episode 26 of the Rock Art Podcast, and we're blessed and honored to have the principal archaeologist for the National Mojave Preserve, which is in the eastern Mojave Desert. His name is David Nichols, and he will be speaking about rock art, his own background, and a unique perspective on rock art.
00:02:15
Speaker
Welcome out there to my audience of people who have tuned in in the past and are tuning in now for the Rock Art Podcast on the Archaeology Podcast Network. And we have a wonderful guest today. He is the archaeologist, the principal archaeologist for the entire National Mojave Preserve. And that is in the eastern Mojave Desert. And it's a jam chucky full of remarkable rock art sites.
00:02:41
Speaker
and he has the responsibility of doing something to manage those sites. And I think we'll hear from David Nichols a bit about his background and how he can possibly go about that. David, are you there?
00:02:54
Speaker
Yes, I am here. Tell us we are geographically right now. So geographically, I am on my own private 30 acre in holding parcel in the middle of the Mojave National Preserve. I'm the only National Park Service employee at this particular Park Service unit that is also a private land holder.
00:03:17
Speaker
And what's one of the unique and wonderful things about this particular park is you can own private property here and the government won't take it away from you, although you are encouraged to sell it, sell your property eventually to the National Park Service. And I am here at 5,200 feet.
00:03:38
Speaker
with my wood burning stove blazing away. That's rather wonderful. So if we look and reflect and take kind of a backwards glance towards your life, the opening question is often one that I call it the million dollar question. How the heck did you get to where you are now? And how did you get interested in this subject matter of archaeology, anthropology, rock art?
00:04:04
Speaker
and things related to Native American or indigenous people worldwide.
Nichols' Career Path from Math to Archaeology
00:04:09
Speaker
How did you ever find yourself interested in specializing in that domain? Where did it all begin? Well, for starters, I am a tribal citizen of the Muscogee Creek Nation of Oklahoma. So I grew up with stories from my grandparents and my parents about the Trail of Tears and
00:04:30
Speaker
the history of the Muscogee Nation from the Georgia and northern Florida, Arkansas areas. And I always had an interest in archaeology and Native American history as pertains to especially North America. And flash forward, in 1989, I graduated from University of California at Santa Barbara.
00:04:53
Speaker
At that time, not having any idea that there was actually a degree offered in anthropology, much less archaeology, so I ended up with a degree in mathematics.
00:05:05
Speaker
but I took that degree. Yeah, I took that degree and it's a BA in mathematics. So it's more theoretical rather than applied side. And I got a job with a small archeological firm in Hawaii. And what I did was I hired on as a computer consultant and I turned, and this is 1989 again, remember, I turned all of his entire business
00:05:30
Speaker
from a hard copy sort of paper business into all computer based, including illustrations and cartography and everything else. And he was such a small company that he eventually started training me and utilizing me in field work, excavation survey and whatnot. A couple of years with him and I hired on with a larger environmental firm.
00:05:56
Speaker
and then spent the next 15 years working across the Pacific from Hawaii to Australia doing archaeological work. Later on, I relocated back to California. Yeah, so half my career was actually in the Pacific and you could divide half of that in again itself between World War II archaeology and prehistoric archaeology of several different Micronesian and Polynesian cultures.
00:06:24
Speaker
got tired of the island life, relocated back to California, which is where I'm from, Los Angeles area, and at age 35 applied to grad school at Sonoma State University and finally got that degree in anthropology.
00:06:40
Speaker
The interesting part of that was they looked back and not having an undergraduate degree in anthropology sort of posed a academic issue for them. They were going to have me do some remedial undergraduate courses, but after my first year in graduate school.
00:06:58
Speaker
with all the years of fieldwork and personal study I had done with theory and methods, decided I didn't have to take any of those undergraduate courses, which was a fortunate thing.
00:07:11
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What did you find was the most kind of valuable or interesting or engaging part of your 15-year stint all across various places doing cultural studies? That must have been fascinating. Well, you know, each island group, and I worked in several different ones. I worked in the Marianas Islands, Guam, the Marshall Islands.
00:07:33
Speaker
and the Hawaiian Islands, they all have a very different, very unique type of archaeology, which is fascinating in and amongst each island group. In Hawaii, you know you could be miles, and this actually happened, I mean miles away from the ocean, you step into a volcanic lava tube and you find a canoe burial in there where you find a skeleton wrapped in decorated bark cloth with woven baskets next to the craniums.
00:08:02
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And that's very different from say something on the island of Tinian and the Northern Marianas Islands where you excavate through 30 centimeters of cultural deposit and find a caliche or calcium carbonate hard pan floor and randomly break through it with an iron bar and find the oldest deposit ever found in the Marianas Islands below that. And that also happened to me as well.
00:08:30
Speaker
It's real different from culture to culture, but the stuff out there is fascinating. Thing is, you have to have a mindset to be able to want to live on islands, which I got burned out on pretty much after that 15 years. So you had 15 years of field work, then you decided to come back to California?
Return to California and Mojave Work
00:08:51
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And you enrolled at Sonoma State to get your master's degree. What was that like? Was that a productive time? Did you do a thesis?
00:09:04
Speaker
Yeah, I did a thesis that I had to defend. You know, my heart was always in this part of California where I work now though, the Mojave Desert. I had grown up coming out here with my father camping and hunting and four wheeling in this area and finding Petroglyphs, a site that you're working on, Mary's Cave. I grew up hunting around that area. So I've known about that site since I was a kid, because my dad always pointed it out to me. So when I came back to California,
00:09:33
Speaker
you don't have bifaces in the Pacific. So I didn't even know what a biface was. So I did not feel qualified to apply to a graduate program in California to do archaeology in the area that I love, knowing that I didn't have the knowledge base. So I did spend five years working in California before I applied to that graduate program. And then when I was accepted into
00:10:00
Speaker
that graduate program at Sonoma State, I did all of my studies in the California desert where I'm at now. Oh, really? Yeah. And what I like to tell aspiring graduate students in archaeology is, hey, do your research while you're in graduate school, while you're able to, in the area that you want to end up in. As it turned out, what happened
00:10:24
Speaker
for me was National Park Service personnel started noticing me sort of haunting around sites that I was aware of in the desert area down here and they ended up hiring me as the local expert. This place where I work now was called the Lonesome Triangle and it was called that in archaeological circles professionally because so
00:10:48
Speaker
Little research had been done here. To date, I've done as much or more research as anybody over the majority of this 1.6 million acre area.
00:10:58
Speaker
Wonderful. What an interesting segue. So you find yourself there in this lonesome triangle. What transformed over the time you've been there? I imagine there's been some rather interesting developments in terms of your program and what you were doing. Were you hired on as the
00:11:22
Speaker
resident expert from the get-go? So they had no field archaeologists. They've always had people, you know, this became a park in 1994 under President Clinton. They've always had sort of an overriding managerial personage in the capacity or title of park archaeologists here. They never had a field person.
00:11:46
Speaker
And typically these people that had held that position were, you know, stodgy old folks that had worked all across the US at various other parks. So I was the first actual, youngish sort of person that they hired on as the park archeologists, quote unquote. And I was expected to run around like a madman and do all kinds of field work, create my own projects, run my own program.
00:12:15
Speaker
which I largely did for up until five years ago, a lots and lots of field work. Okay. And what happened? Well, you know,
00:12:24
Speaker
You get, you get different people in charge of parks and, and a fellow came along and decided that I was, I should be more of a manager and be managing the program and spending much less time in the field. Whereas, you know, is how folks like yourself have come along. So whereas you're doing now the type of research out here that I personally used to do now, you know, I'm more about getting funding.
00:12:51
Speaker
and putting together contracts and finding interested personnel to do the work and sort of writing heard on those contracts. Well, let's jump back. You said that when you were at Sonoma State, you did a thesis and that you spent a lot of time doing research in the Mojave Desert. Can you give us a few glimmers of what that was all about?
00:13:14
Speaker
Sure, so Sonoma State's in the Bay Area, and of course we're about 400 miles south of Sonoma State here in the desert, but I had from day one absolutely planned on and dedicated myself towards doing my research here in what is Mojave National Preserve. So what I ended up doing was finding an old miner's cabin and moving into it lock, stock, and barrel.
00:13:41
Speaker
I lived in this little miner's cabin for eight and a half months and in that cabin I did all of my fieldwork and all of the thesis write up under lantern light. I would do fieldwork during the day and then write up and formalize notes in the evening under lamp light.
00:14:00
Speaker
And we're talking over 100 degrees in the summer, no cooling, and then 6 degree winters in the snow in that same little cabin. What I did was I looked at 12 perennial springs in the preserve. This is a particularly wet part of the Mojave Desert. It's rather surprising. But when you see these things, you realize that there is actually quite a bit of water here.
00:14:25
Speaker
And what I wanted to look at was surveying areas geographically defined, what we call intuitive surveys, right? You come across some kind of a geographic barrier, like a sharp bridge or something, and then if you cross that, you've left the area of interest, which for my study would have been the water source.
Nichols' Thesis on Mojave Water Sources
00:14:48
Speaker
And what I wanted to look at was all of the pre-historic archaeological sites around those water sources and whether or not they were there because of the water access. Were these sites dependent on the water being there or weren't they? And of course,
00:15:09
Speaker
The conclusion to that was both. There were some sites there that absolutely were dependent on water being available. And there were some sites that were absolutely independent of water being there or not. And I did try to write a proposal as a follow-up, because that was my thesis work. But within the park, I told them, hey, that's only half the study.
00:15:35
Speaker
what we should be looking at are similar geographic areas that don't have a water source and seeing what that site distribution looks like. Fascinating. Well.
00:15:49
Speaker
sounds like we've gotten to an interesting juncture in our conversation. We kind of are moving along talking about your thesis and I guess the next thing is going to be to talk about what it's like to be a park archaeologist at the National Mojave Preserve on the 1.6 million acres and what sort of resources are there and
00:16:11
Speaker
What kind of rock art is interesting and dynamic and endlessly engaging? So I'll catch you on the flip flop. Chris Webster here for the Archaeology Podcast Network. We strive for high quality interviews and content so you can find information on any topic in archaeology from around the world. One way we do that is by recording interviews with our hosts and guests located in many parts of the world all at once. We do that through the use of Zencaster. That's Z-E-N-C-A-S-T-R.
00:16:40
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00:16:59
Speaker
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Speaker
So don't miss out on this exciting opportunity for professional and personal development. For more information on pricing and core structure, visit paleoimaging.com. That's P-A-L-E-O, imaging.com. And look for the link in the show notes to this episode. Welcome back to The Rockguard Podcast. This is your host, Dr. Alan Garfinkel. And I'm proud and blessed to have
00:17:48
Speaker
David Nichols, who is the park archaeologist for the National Mojave Preserve. And I apologize, we haven't spoken extensively about that by way of description.
Mojave National Preserve's Significance
00:18:01
Speaker
David, before we jump into some of the strategy and some of the
00:18:05
Speaker
particular challenges that you face in trying to manage almost two million acres. Tell us a bit about what makes the National Mojave Preserve distinctive. Where is it? What is it? And how is it configured? And what kind of elevation, floristic zone and, you know, the run of the land. How's that? The busman's holiday.
00:18:25
Speaker
That all sounds good. Well, Mojave National Preserve is a National Park Service unit. It's called a preserve because we allow mining and ranching and hunting, but it's part of the National Park Service and it's treated just like most other national parks.
00:18:46
Speaker
We have all the emblems and the Rangers with the flat hats and everything else. This is the third largest national park unit in the continental US. Third largest after Yellowstone and Death Valley. So it's huge. Again, 1.6 million acres.
00:19:02
Speaker
We have elevations ranging from 800 feet to 8,000 feet, which include Pleistocene dry lakes all the way up to relic white fir forests up in our highest points.
00:19:19
Speaker
In terms of an archaeological context, you can imagine, especially for a desert environment, that we have just about every kind of resource imaginable. We actually have some unique geographic areas that are Pleistocene relics that are
00:19:37
Speaker
canyons that are situated in such a way that they have retained sort of a coastal scrub type community. So we have things like manzanita and madrone and really lots of oaks. We have live oak and scrub oak and
00:19:55
Speaker
It's interesting. I mean, if you can think about, most people don't think about gathering acorns or pine nuts in the desert, but they absolutely, we absolutely have those resources here. Amazing. So I guess the major plant forms you have is Joshua Tree, pinion pine, and then other sorts of, you know, almost coniferous forested parts, don't you?
00:20:19
Speaker
We do in the highest points. And then we have the low desert scrub that you get down around the Pleistocene, the lakeshores. Those lakeshores are fascinating too because they were actually working, actually I'll talk about that in the third segment, but there's some fascinating and unique archeology to be seen around those lakeshores as well. Fantastic.
00:20:44
Speaker
So since this is a rock art show and one of the reasons I have you on here is because of rock art, can you give us a thumbnail sketch of what kinds of rock art resources there exists in this 1.6 million acre preserve?
Types and Cultural Significance of Rock Art
00:21:01
Speaker
So we have petroglyphs and pictographs. I have yet to find any geoglyphs here, although I know that they're on either side of the preserve itself. So there's no reason to not think that they might be somewhere in the preserve as well. But at 1.6 million acres, I'd say less than 1% has been systematically surveyed and inventoried. So many generations of archaeologists will have plenty of work to do here.
00:21:30
Speaker
Culturally, what we're looking at are the archaic. Those would be the types of great basin, curvilinear, abstract type stuff that can't be culturally typed. That's sort of the catch-all.
00:21:46
Speaker
ancient types of petroglyphs that we find. Coming into 700 to 1700, you've got Pataean style, which would be the ancestral Mojave. The Mojave specific to this area. This is kind of the heartland of the Mojave prior to 1700. And theirs is what we call the Grapevine Canyon style. It's a very distinctive style. It's geometric. It tends to be symmetrical.
00:22:16
Speaker
The glyphs tend to be complete in and of themselves. You can find them in combinations or you can find them by themselves, a unique glyph. To our Eurocentric eye, they're rather pleasing looking, unlike the archaic stuff, which is sort of meanders and has lines that wander off with dots and scarring on the rock surface.
00:22:42
Speaker
And then the most recent style we have is what they call the Numics Scratching, which we ascribe to the Chemehuevi, which are southern Paiute group that moved into the area along through the Numics expansion in the 1700s. And in this area, those were the peoples that the US Army and miners and homesteaders and travelers, immigrants were running into in this area.
00:23:12
Speaker
The numix scratching tends to be a single fine line in size. It tends to look like cross hatching or chevrons. A lot of times you'll find it superimposed over the top of the Mojave Pattayan style.
00:23:29
Speaker
The Mojave Pattayan style tends to be much larger glyphs than the Nui scratching, and it comes in a variety of methods of typologies, including pecked, grooved, and abraded.
00:23:45
Speaker
And the the archaic style tends to be pecked and abraded. So that's the and we also have picked pictographs. Pictographs are tight, harder to type. We generally think that the the Numa were making the pictographs out here as well as the Mojave. We're not completely sure. We haven't really done any kind of dating.
00:24:11
Speaker
out here for pictographs and stylistically they're kind of all over the place. We haven't been able to pin them down or attribute them to any particular group with the exception of when we find horse and rider images.
00:24:26
Speaker
in which case we are able to ascribe those to the Numa. Interesting. Also with the petroglyphs style, I think you can include cupules. We don't have a lot of cupule sites out here, but when we do, they're usually at pretty special, intense use areas.
00:24:45
Speaker
Interesting. What has been the general thought of the purpose or the sort of the function and nature of these rock art expressions?
Interpretations of Rock Art's Purpose
00:24:53
Speaker
What have the scholars, the archaeologists, the anthropologists helped us understand its nature of how those particular expressions, those sites fit into the cultural systems as part of their ongoing life ways? Well, you're asking the wrong guy that question. So I learned
00:25:16
Speaker
I learned early on that archaeologists that work in the rock art, in theory of rock art and what it means and scholastic theory. I mean, you're not going to find two PhDs that have the same thought on it. I actually did a paper in graduate school about
00:25:39
Speaker
whether or not rock art could be considered doodling. I mean, there's, you know, they have the same brains that we have now. They have the same thought processes. They have the same interests. They probably did artwork. They probably had some leisure time. Why couldn't they be doodles? And when I threw that out there, boy, I was, I got hammered by the rock art community.
00:26:02
Speaker
They don't want to hear anything about prehistoric doodling. So, you know, I leave it to folks like yourself and Dr. Whitley, and what I like to do is read
00:26:17
Speaker
the different literature and what the latest theories are on the rock art. But I don't, I don't speak to it myself because I don't study it the same way you, you manic rock art folk do.
00:26:33
Speaker
But I am interested in it and I do keep up with it. But you know, the general feeling is that it's ceremonial and I can see in terms of larger site context why that would be considered as it is. Out here specifically, you tend to find rock art a lot of times around significant water sources. You know, you could argue that.
00:27:00
Speaker
the fact that you're in this this vast desert and there's water there that you might take some time and and peck some images on the stones around you because you don't have to hurry up you've got water right there and a lot of times out here you'll find bedrock milling associated with these
00:27:17
Speaker
especially petroglyph sites around water sources too. So, you know, arguably you're sustaining yourself while you're sitting there with an abundance of water and scribing these images to the stone faces. Well, let's talk about a different aspect of rock art. Why are people so interested in rock art, the general public, Native Americans? There seems to be a growing passion certainly to visit
00:27:44
Speaker
and perhaps appreciate rock art sites. Do you see that in the park?
00:27:49
Speaker
Yeah, for sure. And I understand that. Okay. Yeah, for sure. It's fascinating because you're looking at, you know, rock art, especially petroglyphs, arguably, they can last longer than say a midden or a site archaeologically that can be eroded away. And out here, you know, you're looking at thousands upon thousands of years and you're wondering,
00:28:15
Speaker
what these people put there and why they do it and why is one style so distinctive from another? What's the meaning behind them? And it's fascinating to muse on it. And again, I get the public all the time coming out here going, Hey, where are all the rock art sites? I want to see some petroglyphs. And there are a couple sites that we guide them to, but the majority of them we do not. Yeah, it's just interesting. You're, you're looking at,
00:28:43
Speaker
and you can put your hand up next to something that somebody 10,000 years ago had their hand next to. And who knows what they were thinking or doing when they were ascribing that image to the rock face. Which sites do you typically lead the public to that are protected and perhaps available for public interpretation? We have what's called the hole in the wall. Hole in the wall, rings, loop, trail.
00:29:13
Speaker
where we actually have interpretive signage and we interpret the site which people can visit if people do a minimal amount of research on the internet they can find all kinds of other sites in the preserve itself that they can visit there's a fellow out of baker whose name was bill man.
00:29:33
Speaker
And he's published locations of sites out here. And then there's a lot of people that have institutional knowledge that they've been sharing with others and word gets out. But, you know, there's hundreds upon hundreds of sites out here, rock art sites. So, you know, you got to figure 3% of them, if that are known. So largely the sites are, are in a passive preservation state in that people don't know where they are. So they can't be affected.
00:30:03
Speaker
So given this tremendous inventory of rock art sites, both petroglyphs and pictographs, how do you manage them? How do you protect them?
Documentation and Protection of Rock Art
00:30:14
Speaker
Well, what we try to do is document them. We want to document them and inventory them so that we can have a baseline by which we can monitor them. For the most part, there's nothing we can do except educate the public. And that works. You know, we have examples. You've seen them out here of
00:30:35
Speaker
hunters and others using petroglyphs for target practice. Not so much now, but back in the day when this was Bureau of Land Management lands out here in kind of the Wild West, people had a lot less respect for because they had a lot less knowledge of and about the resources per se.
00:30:57
Speaker
So the baseline documentation and inventory is primarily what we're trying to do and then protecting locational information from just anybody. We don't lead huge tours or anything like that. And when we do run into people that have knowledge of the locations of these, we just sort of tell them, Hey, it's not illegal to share that knowledge, but these are the issues that we have.
00:31:22
Speaker
And this is why we would prefer you not to publish or openly share this resource knowledge with others. Are you seeing a growing veneration or sort of respect for the rock art or is that something we're still working on? No, that's absolutely right. Yeah, I've seen the damage of the resources, the rock art resources and archaeological sites in general out here.
00:31:48
Speaker
remarkably in the 19 years that I've been out here. It's really people have grown to respect and you know one of the things I do is I talk to local groups in Las Vegas, in Needles, some of the smaller communities surrounding me and I give presentations on these things and I share the knowledge that professionally you and I are
00:32:10
Speaker
Into reading in the gray literature and whatnot and and then they feel like they're included in the protection of the resources Yeah, so you're gonna surprise us in the third segment with some sort of a amazing case study Specifically rock art well, whatever
00:32:30
Speaker
Give us a teaser. What do you got for us? Well, I'd like to talk about the study we're doing around one of our dry lakes. It's pretty interesting. Wow. Okay. Well, we look forward for that in the next segment. See you all in the flip-flop.
00:32:49
Speaker
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00:33:09
Speaker
Hey, all you folks out in archaeology podcast land. This is your rock art podcast with Dr. Alan Garfinkel of the California Rock Art Foundation. And we're blessed and honored to have David Nichols, who's the park archaeologist for the National Mojave Preserve in the eastern Mojave Desert of California. Are you there, David? I am. And you had surprised us at the end of that last segment
00:33:37
Speaker
with a little treasure, you said you're going to unveil a very, very interesting and engaging project that you think has some legs, and perhaps would be of great interest to our listeners. Please, go right ahead.
Soda Mountains Lithic Study
00:33:53
Speaker
So we got, oh God, it must be 12 years ago now, an interesting proposal by a young associate professor, Dr. Edward Nell at Cal State Fullerton,
00:34:05
Speaker
to do a survey and an inventory of some rock quarry sites in the Soda Mountains, which is the very westernmost bound of our park here.
00:34:19
Speaker
The Soda Mountains also happen to be the western boundary of Soda Dry Lake, which is one of these huge Pleistocene dry lakes, and it's the terminus of the internally draining, mostly subterranean Mojave River, rather a famous river.
00:34:35
Speaker
for those of us that work in this area. As it turns out, this had a very unique seam of kind of a blue, black, gray, and a sight that they were just quarrying the heck out of and making these huge palm-sized by-faces out of on-site. And these quarries were all on this. And you do not find this particular type of material
00:34:59
Speaker
anywhere else in the in the preserve, only around this lake and in these quarry sites. So I have no idea. We had no idea where this material is going. And that part of the study is ongoing. They were definitely working it around the perimeter of Soda Dry Lake.
00:35:19
Speaker
And they're of a type that's called Mojave point type. And it's like a Pleistocene type of point, Lake Mojave complex. We're guessing that the material is moving westward because it's definitely not moving eastward. But after we saw that, we started expanding the survey to include the entirety of what would have been the lakeshore of Soda Dry Lake.
00:35:47
Speaker
And we started doing transects parallel to what would have been the shoreline, and we were finding bands of sites that would have been along Pleistocene lakeshores. Fascinating part of it is we found three of those bands.
00:36:04
Speaker
And those bands are showing morphological and technological differences in point typologies and other types of artifacts that are describing temporarily different shorelines. I rarely have seen water in this lake basin, but this study is speaking to a sedentary culture type that is exploiting lake type resources, including shellfish,
00:36:33
Speaker
probably migratory birds. We haven't done any excavations around these shorelines, but this study has been going on for quite some time and it's ongoing and the data just gets more and more interesting and Dr. Nell has been really great at publishing and giving papers on describing what he thinks has been going on there.
00:36:57
Speaker
What's interesting is very few people that work in this area have attempted to do this type of Paleo Indian, arguably type study. He came from the Midwest and so he was really only looking for that really, really early stuff. So I was very skeptical when he came down here.
00:37:18
Speaker
and proposed this study, but the further he pursues it, the more interesting it becomes, because I don't find that type of early, early culture in most of the rest of the park. And we only have two of these sort of old Pleistocene lake beds, and nothing's been done at the other one. He's been concentrating all of his work at this Soda Lake complex, and it's just been fascinating.
00:37:46
Speaker
So these Western STEM points that he's talking about, these are Lake Mojave and Silver Lake points, or, or also they, they believe that some of those may have been actual tools or implements rather than even projectile points or dart points. But according to Claude Warren, who's worked at the, you know, the Lake Mojave site itself for much of his adult career, that whole period dates between, I think 7,000 and 12,000.
00:38:16
Speaker
years ago. Yeah, it's in that margin. And Dr. Warren was the one that first identified that Lake Mojave complex. So not that much is known about it. And the work that Claude did was very limited. So this is really on the tails of his pioneering work, far and away the most type of work that's been done for that early, early stuff in that area.
00:38:43
Speaker
But yeah, you're right. I've never heard of anyone really doing a rigorous study of quarry or by face blanks or some sort of reduction process that I know that Nell is famous for in terms of retrofitting or examining the actual
00:38:59
Speaker
lithic technology reduction and all of that involved, which would be absolutely fascinating. And there is a controversy surrounding how ancient those Western STEM points are. Some people believe that they are in fact coterminous or coincidental synchronous with the Western fluted style and go back to the almost the earliest Paleo-Indian remains in all of California. You're probably aware of that, aren't you?
00:39:29
Speaker
Yeah, and I think particularly the Mojave or Silver Lake point is considered a little bit even earlier than what they call the Great Basin Stemmed. I think it's typologically a little bit unique from that and considered possibly a precursor or something a little bit earlier than the stem point. Interesting.
00:39:57
Speaker
Yeah, we do occasionally find fluting on some of these things as well. Fascinating. Yeah, I was going to ask you about that. So there seems to be a derivative element of the technology that's carried forward from that Western fluted ancient stratum. Right. And of course, that's a subject that I've been working on on and off for many years. But there's the issue surrounding
00:40:24
Speaker
And certainly in California, which is an ongoing discussion, and I'd say a very topical controversy as to how old is there, first of all, a Western Clovis expression in California? And if it is, how old is it? What is it endured to? And how does that technological structure relate back to perhaps some of the more classic material on the plains or in the American Southwest?
00:40:53
Speaker
And then of course, what were they eating? Were they really doing anything with some of that megafauna that we hear about because there has never been any incontrovertible associations of
00:41:07
Speaker
megafaunal remains and human use anywhere in California. Right. As I understand it.
Ancient Trade Routes around Soda Lake
00:41:15
Speaker
Yeah. And I throw the Clovis first arguments or Clovis in California, theorists in the same bag with you rock art nuts. I will not participate.
00:41:31
Speaker
You're going to sidestep the controversy. So you'll let us dabble and try to deal with the data such as it is and see what we can do to resolve some of these thorny problems, problems of typology, chronology. But you were saying that there seems to be some association
00:41:57
Speaker
with distinctive or chronological typological expressions that are associated with certain episodes of the lake.
00:42:05
Speaker
Yes, yeah, it's fascinating. We have three distinct lakeshore bands. And he's done all kinds of modeling and looking at environmental conditions to the early Holocene, late Pleistocene era to see how those would reflect what the water stands would have looked like. And now he's got some grad students working on what would have been areas of shoreline growth
00:42:34
Speaker
where there could have been other seed resources or those types of things going on across that shoreline. So the quarries are on the western shore of the lake and the stands where they're moving the material to where you actually have playa expressions are on the east side. So all you see on the west side of the lake is crazy quarrying.
00:43:00
Speaker
and making these big by-faces and moving material. But you don't see secondary, tertiary, or finishing product production until you go to the east side of the lake. So they're procuring material on the west side, and then they're walking all the way around that thing, past Baker, California, to the Playa stands on the east side.
00:43:24
Speaker
Yeah, it's really interesting. And he just sent me even more data today, which was even more interesting. Is this Soda Lake and Nell's work in the preserve still part of that same expression that we call Lake Mojave? It is. Lake Mojave is made up of Soda Lake and Silver Lake combined. So those two, even those...
00:43:52
Speaker
Yeah, we consider Silver Lake the overflow of Sodor Lake. The two combined altogether is considered Lake Mojave. So all the work that Claude's done and the work that Nell's doing might interfinger at some point, and we might have some sort of a take about what was going on chronologically, typologically, and even technologically in that fact. And then we just have to figure out
00:44:21
Speaker
what they're eating and what they're doing, right? Yeah. And Nels is going to be the greatest and latest because of course he's incorporating and speaking to the work that Claude had done. And Claude Warren actually came out with us in the field and showed us where he had excavated.
00:44:39
Speaker
and the sorts of things that he found and theoretically what he was thinking about. So nobody would have to go back to the original source material. It will be expressed in Nell's work. Nobody else is doing this kind of work out here, that's for sure. No, I'm sure not. Well, I know that just as a sidebar, during the excavations that Claude had done, he found
00:45:07
Speaker
an obsidian flake buried in one of their units and it was sourced to the COSO obsidian source. The hydration rim, the measurement was quite substantial, certainly not quite equivalent to the oldest of the paleoindian remains but
00:45:29
Speaker
damn near. Fascinating stuff. What other things about other projects do you think have some rock art sizzle to them? I know ours did. What about the work there at the other site vis-a-vis the archaeoastronomical elements out there at Council Rocks?
00:45:55
Speaker
Yeah, that's interesting. And you found a lot more that was credible to theorizing that some archaeoastronomical elements exist at the Council Rocks site and the Mary's Cape site also. And Dr. David Whitley has spoke to a little bit of that.
00:46:15
Speaker
Again, I read about it and I study on it. I don't personally have much in the way of theories about it, but it's interesting. It's interesting to me. Those sorts of things are hard to prove when you don't have a lot of ethnographic information about them, and we really kind of don't. We have, in my opinion, sort of Eurocentric
00:46:41
Speaker
views of what midnight is or when the sun strikes a certain crack and a certain rock and things like that. But it's still interesting to me. It's hard to source and locate and identify that in if you talk to the tribes today about these particular sites or try to identify it in some of the ethnohistoric or ethnographic literature
00:47:10
Speaker
the turn of the last century. Yeah, because much of their knowledge is now somewhat incomplete because of this demorication with the Euro-American intrusion and all of the catastrophes that face them in terms of trying to keep their culture alive and dealing with just the decimation and the population reduction and the loss of their cultural life ways. So we're trying to piece it together.
00:47:38
Speaker
Absolutely that. And, you know, without being disrespectful, I mean, factually, in the rebuilding of some of their cultural characteristics and trying to rebuild the stories of their people, and origin stories and things like that, necessarily, they're bringing in elements of
00:48:01
Speaker
modern-day Christian mysticism and other things that have influenced them culturally in the last 150 years that they identify with and are incorporated into what they now construe as the history of their cultures and their origins and their beginnings. Sure, sure.
00:48:24
Speaker
And with any culture, of course, we're seeing the dynamics of cultures may appear to be stagnant, but they're vital and alive things and wax and wane and change and transform.
00:48:39
Speaker
I find that to be one of the more interesting elements of trying to understand some of the transformations and modifications of indigenous culture in rock art and as a sidebar, some of the stuff that I've done on the ghost dance rock art. Interesting. So anyways, I guess that's a good place to leave it with another mystery. Yeah.
00:49:09
Speaker
David, it's been a pleasure. The hour went way too fast, and we'd love to have you back again sometime. But I really appreciate you taking the time out of your rather busy schedule to talk with us and share your passion for the Eastern Mojave Desert, the National Mojave Preserve, rock art, and archaeology anthropology. It's wonderful. Yeah. Cool. It was my pleasure.
00:49:38
Speaker
Thank you. See you next week, gang.
00:49:48
Speaker
Thanks for listening to the Rock Art Podcast with Dr. Alan Garfinkel and Chris Webster. You can find this podcast on the educational podcast app Lyceum, L-Y-C-E-U-M, and wherever you find podcasts. Find show notes and contact information at www.arcpodnet.com forward slash rock art. Thanks for listening and thanks for sharing this podcast with your family and friends.
00:50:26
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV Traveling America, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, and the Archaeology Podcast Network, and was edited by Rachel Rodin. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com.
00:50:49
Speaker
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